TubeTalk: Your YouTube How-To Guide

Your Subscribers Don't Matter, But Your Enjoyment Does

• vidIQ • Season 6 • Episode 39

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We explore the psychological aspects of content creation on YouTube, focusing on finding enjoyment in the process rather than obsessing over metrics, and discuss practical approaches to channel growth beyond subscriber counts.

• Subscriber counts don't necessarily correlate with viewership or channel success
• Finding content you genuinely enjoy creating is crucial for long-term sustainability 
• Brand deals are accessible for smaller creators who develop authentic connections with their audience
• YouTube's discovery system has evolved beyond traditional metadata like categories and tags
• A/B testing titles and thumbnails can help optimization but won't compensate for weak content ideas
• Small adjustments to metadata can sometimes dramatically increase impressions and visibility
• Creating connections with viewers is more valuable than accumulating vanity metrics
• Even small creators with under 10k subscribers can secure sponsorship opportunities

If you're enjoying the podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review. Your support helps us reach more creators with this valuable information.


Speaker 1:

Really important. If you can subscribe, it really does help the channel.

Speaker 2:

No, it doesn't. Finding something you just really enjoy doing is always going to be better for you in the long term, because, a you're just going to have fun and B if it turns out to be successful, you're in a great spot.

Speaker 1:

That is worth more than you know. A thousand views in an hour.

Speaker 2:

We are creators, but we're also directors, writers, actors, editors, so we actually have a lot to offer. Hey, welcome to the only podcast that will record on the holiday, because I forget that I'm supposed to take holidays off. I'm travis and I'm here with the guy who's not taking a holiday because not a holiday in his country, rob correct travis.

Speaker 1:

It was the public holiday this time last week and I had, I've got to confess, a bit of a shock over the last week. I was looking on my phone and I saw a headline it said taylor swift is engaged to travis. But it was all in one line anyway. Like it cut off the surname and I thought for a second oh for the guy.

Speaker 2:

But alas, it wasn't you, my life would have changed forever. I mean, I'm not a swifty or anything, but, um, I would be. Listen, she has a lot of money. That'd been cool. This podcast is not about swifties. It's about, uh, growing your youtube channel. It can be. If it's going to get a bigger audience, it's going to give us more views. We might, we might switch to the shifty or shift to the swifty, which is that fast say that a couple times, I can't even say it once uh, where we help you grow your youtube channels, and of course, we're here to do that. But before we do that, we're going to talk a little bit about some fun stuff. We have like a group of people that watch us. They just love the environment that we create and you'll see that in the emails that we'll do here in a little bit.

Speaker 3:

I'm up for that.

Speaker 2:

Well, that's the hope we're going to go over are chat gbt a little bit helping people with their channel. We're also going to answer a question about um shorts channels and, you know, not getting as many views as, as your quote, competitors. Uh, we're going to talk about thumbnails. We got. We got a couple of things we're going to answer here on today's podcast. But before all that, um right as right as before we were coming on, I was asking uh rob what he um, right as right as before we were coming on, I was asking uh rob what he did this weekend. You said that you were playing um, your switch 2, which you're enjoying.

Speaker 1:

Yes, I think it's been a good purchase. It's been a combination of playing games that I had before on the switch, one which is hollow knight and mario od Odyssey both amazing games, and now I've got to experience what I think is the triple A killer game you must buy a Switch to because of this game. It's not Mario Kart, it is Donkey Kong Bonanza. Anybody who has played this game will agree with me, really, and I will say to them banana, banana, because that's all I've been doing for the last three weeks collecting bananas, and it is incredible. Outrageous cost of games. Nintendo, I'm still hate them for that.

Speaker 2:

yeah, when they make a good game, they just suck you in travis uh, saturday, speaking of video games, I went to pax west, which is here in seattle actually, as we're recording, the last day is today uh, which is a bunch of video games.

Speaker 2:

It's a convention in seattle where a bunch of video game companies come in and I and I got to see a whole bunch of cool things, a big thing for switch to there with a bunch of games and stuff, um, so you know, I've been surrounded by video games all weekend. The funny thing is is like, I have this, this video game backlog, which I think most people do, and I decided to buy a game I've already beaten many years ago and I'm obsessed with it again borderlands 3. I can't stop playing it. So, my backlog of games I've never played sitting there, game I I beat eight years ago, had I bought it and I'm playing the heck out of it, having a great old time I remember with borderlands 3 that around about eight hours into the game, because you get everything's fully customizable right like every weapon you get.

Speaker 1:

You either sell it or like that's the one that replaces I think I got an overpowered weapon very early on and I think it lasted me the entire game pretty much like tens of hours of it and I think it's cool, but I don't know if it's spoiling experience. We were talking about this on the live stream as well and this is maybe a question to all of you how many games have you got in your catalog that you haven't played yet? Because I asked this question to dan and it appears to be that anybody who has a steam account has hundreds of games have bought when they've been heavily discounted and never actually played them, and he was in the hundreds yeah, it's funny you say that because I have a video that it's already scripted out that I want to shoot about gaming backlogs.

Speaker 2:

So I talk about the psychology behind it. I think it's much like people with movies and stuff they buy movies, they don't necessarily get around to watching all of them.

Speaker 1:

I can give you my gaming backlog right now, because I've gone away from having the PSN network and Xbox Game Pass, so I'm limited to my choices about a few physical games. So what I've got to do is finish off donkey and bonanza, obviously, good luck. Then I've got uh, 3d mario world, okay. Uh, legend of zelda, echo of wisdoms, which is like a puzzle game.

Speaker 1:

Interesting game, interesting stray okay, you know, even though I have like a dislike for cats, I'm gonna give it a try. Cyberpunk, cyberpunk, which is great. Not get on with witcher 3, but I've decided anyway cyberpunk's great, and there's one more game on the switch, but I can't remember what it is right now. Oh, mario rpg. Oh well, there's like six games there. Travis, I would assume that would take me through to Christmas.

Speaker 2:

Easy, yeah, easy, because you're not just sitting there only playing games and that's it. Yes, I am Even during this podcast, okay, sorry. So let's get back into Banana. Banana we need a sound effect that says banana. We need a sound effect that says banana. We need that. Let's get into some of your questions. Of course, if you want to, you can write us at theboostatvidiqcom. Also, if you're listening to the audio podcast, there's a link there for text, but today we're doing emails and one kind of special message which we'll get to a little bit later on. First question is from Steven To my favorite podcast. I have a simple question that hopefully has a simple answer. I would love to know your thoughts. When posting a long-form video, what is the best category to select? I know the answer I figured you'd Hold on.

Speaker 2:

Let me finish reading this For some context. I have a gaming channel called Single Player Lounge First of all, I like that name when I do game pickups, unboxings and reviews Recently lounge first of all, I like that name where I do game pickups, unboxes and reviews. Recently, my wife god I got married and plays video games. How does this? How is this a world? I want this world. Oh, I went out game hunting on our anniversary. Wait, and she didn't divorce you.

Speaker 1:

What's going on? So most of the played, well, played this guy's. This guy's beat the final boss and everything.

Speaker 2:

No kidding, do not let her go. Uh, most of the video is around what we find and pick up, but there's a little bit of what also we do as well, which makes it feel like a vlog. Yeah, would it be better to leave it as the gaming category of people vlog, and how would changing affect the right audience? Thanks for all you do. Keep us motivated. Okay, I think this goes into that. Youtube frequently will label things and either they used to mean something or they're just trying to make it clear and they've actually made it more muddy. They seem to do this a lot.

Speaker 1:

So if you load up the YouTube homepage or you tap on YouTube app, you'll see these little chips at the top of the feed that are more granular than YouTube categories of the feed that are more granular than YouTube categories, and so I think that proves that YouTube is being more selective with how they define content other than those categories. There's also a new tool that's come out called the Hype feature, and how it works is that you hype videos and then they're ranked on different leaderboards, and these leaderboards are divided by categories. None of those categories in those leaderboards relate to the categories that you set on your video. I think at this point it's safe to say that the categories dropdown in the YouTube studio is about as useful as video tags, in that maybe they do something, maybe they don't, but it probably has a 0.1 percent impact on the video in my opinion, there used to be and I'm looking for it um, there used to be a help page about this and they were very clear that it didn't do anything.

Speaker 2:

Um, they actually said that it was more helpful for like ads and stuff.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's the legacy, understanding of it I have but the question now is like, does it even do that now? Because a lot of these things change over time, like they'll make these changes to the way youtube works and then the old stuff doesn't work the way and here, as a software company vid iq, like that happens all the time. It was supposed to at the beginning. And I do remember specifically reading that help page a long time ago where it was like this is just for that, it doesn't have anything to do with where your video will show up. Um, there's a ton of videos out there that are just set to the. What is the generic thing when you first put out this entertainment or something? Um, when you very first set up a youtube, channel.

Speaker 1:

Isn't that the top of the categories?

Speaker 2:

but you have to pick one to begin with yeah, I can't even remember, but it's like it's something non-specific.

Speaker 2:

It's not going to keep you from getting views, let's just say that just say the thing you really want to know, not going to help keep you from getting views. It's not going to help you find the right audience. Youtube is set up in a way that it will try to find the right audience in spite of anything you do to mess it up, like it's trying to find the audience regardless. So in a lot of ways, I could say you can't mess it up. I don't want to say that because I feel like I could be proven wrong, but it'd be very difficult to mess up a video to make it not work because, um, I told this story a while back. Uh, I might have even told it to you, rob, but um years ago, when ksi had a boxing match, um, and he was streaming it. They were streaming it on youtube and they kept getting taken down in real time yeah what I thought was interesting is, at one point it was a cat and mouse game.

Speaker 2:

The uploaders and restreamers of this live stream were naming it things that had nothing to do with ks5. As a human, you kind of wink, wink, nudge, nudge right, and thumbnails that had nothing to do with the fight, but they would continue to get served and people kept finding them, and that's that's even more of a interesting thing than what this category thing is, because you're putting videos out there that say they're not anything to do with it, but youtube's algorithm knows what it is and still serves it. So, even in spite of all of those things, it still found the right audience.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, if I was to give like a final answer on this. If your category is usually gaming, if you leave it there, I think you're perfectly fine. If you decide to put it on people and vlogs or whatever you think they've changed it to, you're not wrong, you should be fine. And what I think is cool is that they're this creator is exploring um more things and kind of expanding the I guess, the law of their channel in that they're doing something with their wife. Do they usually do that on a channel? If not, that's cool to introduce someone else to your community. And the fact that you're having these kind of storytelling moments in the video, which I think is cool, because it sounds like you're not going to package the video in a way of you're not packaging it as a vlog, but it's going to have vlog elements in it.

Speaker 2:

So you're testing new storytelling techniques within your videos and I commend you for doing that and I hope it performs well I would also say that if your wife is is up for it, I would actually make her more part of the channel, if that's something that you'd be okay with, because it makes it more interesting. It's not just the normal gamer thing you see everywhere. A husband wife gaming channel is a lot more rare. You'll have a lot less competition and it might be more interesting. Furthermore, like what Rob said, I like that you're trying to do other things, and it's smart from a longevity standpoint, because, rather than getting people to come in and be interested in just the game you're playing, they're getting interested in you, which is the only way you're going to be able to jump from game to game and still have any type of audience. People come for you and not the game. Hopefully that helps. All right. So that's first one down. Ken theboost at vidIQcom. If you want to send us an email, you can do that there and we will try to answer it. And this next one comes from Brendan. Hey guys, hope all is well with all of you.

Speaker 2:

I'm relatively a new subscriber, but I've been watching your videos like crazy. I've already picked up a couple of really solid tips. I repurposed an old YouTube channel that I was using to watch daily content into a shorts channel. First of all, I think most of us have done that. I repurposed my channel from just a watching channel. My first upload was August 7th and it performed well, hitting the shorts feed and getting over 1,000 views. We can always talk about what that actually means, because, of course, views now versus views a year ago two different things. But okay, it has good impression rate and good retention as well, but it just kind of died. No more impressions and no more views. The next seven uploads have garnered under 25 views and minimal impressions. No shorts feed.

Speaker 2:

Looking at other channels in my niche, I believe that my content is much more appealing and stands out. Some people have posted four times and had two 800 videos and two duds where it feels like I've hatched seven duds now. Also, I know my videos are gradually getting better in terms of editing stickers, titles and descriptions. I went through chat gpt meta checklist and there's no issues. Chat gpt said after 10 uploads I should get more impressions. My needs stay consistent. Is this permanent? Why do some questions break out of the face sooner? Do you have any tips?

Speaker 2:

So this and while this is specific to shorts, really to be honest, this could be talked about for long form, because it's all about getting an audience and then being like we don't know anything about your specific channel. Um, we don't know whether or not, of course, everyone feels like they're getting better as they do more content. We'll take your word for it. We don't know that to be true, but we'll take your word for it. But also, we don't know, um, what your content is. Because what if we watch it and we're like I don't understand that, but it makes sense to you, like you made it. So everything in the video makes sense to you, but when someone else on the other side of the screen looks at it, I don't understand. I don't get the point. It's not as entertaining. That's where the rubber meets the road, rob. Let's talk a little bit about Shorts Views and since this's a newer creator, they may not know this that the shorts view numbers changed, uh, in the last year or so. Right, when was it like last year? When was that?

Speaker 1:

or this year, six months ago uh, it was like march time they went from you having to watch a shot for a certain period of time, depending on how long the shot was. For example, let's say the shot was 30 seconds, you might have to watch that shot for actually five or six seconds for it to count as a view. Now, that's not relevant, like you can. Just it's not very good for an audio podcast, is it? There you go, just swiping through shots as fast as you can. They count as a view, so does that actually mean it's a view? These days, it could be argued the value of an engaged view versus a view. Look in your analytics for that to see how many views you're actually getting. And, just to be honest, a thousand views on a single shot is still a teeny tiny sample size of data for YouTube to work with. It is curious that you had one shot that did well and then the rest have been duds.

Speaker 1:

It goes back to your question Travis of like what's the topic and what's the nature of the content? Because what I have seen and I'm not saying this is necessarily what you've done, but what I have seen is when people are repurposing content from elsewhere, downloading clips, football highlights, that type of stuff. One video may really take off, but then it's kind of it may be suppressed, and again I'm kind of speculating here it may be suppressed by YouTube's discovery because it's seen and treated as repurposed, repetitious content. If that is not the case like you're fully making it 100%, it's authentically you then we have to go into the typical questions of are the topics related? You think your video is awesome, but you know, the other channels that you're comparing yourself to might have a bit of background and history and a bit of a community.

Speaker 2:

uh, it's incomplete information, as always, unfortunately yeah, I mean short form versus long form, kind of same thing. Um, and yeah, you will see some videos pop off while others don't and, quite frankly, um, the fact that you got a thousand views very early on is actually the opposite. What you should see is what you're seeing now, especially as a new channel very few impressions, very few views, and then over time you get like a pop off, and that's kind of the thing with shorts is, uh, it sometimes sets an unrealistic expectation of what you should expect to see. Um, the reality is 99 of the people that upload, you know, their first couple of videos or shorts are going to see almost nothing for quite a while. Even this podcast channel itself I remember we talked about very early on that for the first, like almost week, even though we uploaded two or three videos right off the bat, it had two impressions period two impressions, not views impressions for a long time and it just takes a while for it to find the right audience. Now, if it doesn't find the right audience, there might be a reason for that, and it is hard to take yourself out of your own shoes and go.

Speaker 2:

Is that video really better than mine? You might be right. Your email, might you know. You said you're very confident that your content is better. You might actually be right. You might actually be right, but they also probably have a larger audience, in which case it's easy for them to find. It's easier for youtube to find an audience to watch their content, versus you, who are brand new and just coming out. And it's not to say that these videos won't get views later. We actually have shorts to give views to this very day. They were put out. How long ago? Year, two years, whatever. Um, you said a large portion, I think. Uh, rob of our shorts get search views, which means they're not. They didn't get them right off the bat. They're getting them over. Yeah, so just because you didn't get the views now doesn't mean you won't get them later, and so just keep pressing on and can keep continuing to be better every time out.

Speaker 1:

We often encourage creators with long form content to you know, make 25 videos over a six month period without looking at the analytics too much. Don't download the YouTube studio at this point, because if you're refreshing your video three hours after it's gone live and it's got seven views, that can be a bit demoralizing. And I always want to find out first from the creator do you love YouTube? Do you love waking up in the morning with a new idea and making a video, regardless of how many people watch it?

Speaker 1:

I feel as if, like, get through that stage of you know that rite of passage and if after six months, you're still saying to yourselves I guess in your case, maybe after you've made a hundred shots, I still love making shots. I know they're not performing that well, but I'm getting better with every single one that I make and I'm learning new techniques and skills and I feel as if I'm becoming a better storyteller. Just enjoy that period of innocence before you then have the pressure of all these people hoping and expecting that your next video is as good as the previous one Because it doesn't last for long if you stick it on youtube either that the pressure of not being discovered is soon changed by expectation, and that is. That's a scary thing as well.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I've talked about this before and it's a massive thing that, um, especially newer creators don't recognize is the story I always tell is when I very first started, I considered a video successful when I had 100 views. Like I'm like, holy crap, 100 views, that's a lot of people, and if a video ever made it to a thousand, I would never think about it again because it so surpassed my expectation. Yet later in my career, if I didn't get a thousand views in 30 minutes, I was really upset. So you know, finding something you just really enjoy doing is always going to be better for you in the long term, because they just have fun and B if it turns out to be successful, you're in a great spot. You're doing something you already love. You're not doing things you don't like. The worst thing you can do and I've talked to many creators have done this is make a video just because it's a popular thing to do and they don't really care for it.

Speaker 1:

And it pops off and now that's your channel. Congratulations, you played yourself. Uh, not exactly great a decade ago. I go to bed at night and think, if I, if this video that just went live gets 300 views tomorrow, I'll be happy. Fast forward 10 years. We get around about 10 000 views an hour on the channel, which means that you try and figure it out. There's probably four or five people in the world watching me right now, 24 7.

Speaker 2:

I'm still not satisfied all right I want 100 people watching me all of the time it just never ends it's, it's the human nature of of youtube that no one ever really tells you when you're trying to grow your channel, that, like this, is a thing you need to keep in check as best you can. Uh, because it's a, it's a thing that doesn't go away and it's not even anything that youtube specifically the thing is. I feel like youtube contributes to this in a way accidentally, because we just see numbers going up. We know a bigger number quote equals good, right, but we don't actually attach humans to those numbers, even though we should imagine if 50 of those people were in the room with you saying I love your videos, you probably would never.

Speaker 2:

You probably think I'm the most amazing person in the world, like you wouldn't even think I only got 50 views. You'd be like holy crap, I got 50, 50 people in here and they love me and it just it anonymizes the connections. That's why I talked about a couple episodes back where some of the comments people have left me were so impactful, because you start to put the connection with the fact you're connecting with people. Uh, it's not just a number. If it's a number, you can go. Ah, I want that number to be bigger. If it's like people, it's it's harder to to downplay that.

Speaker 1:

I think that's really important in the in the first hour I used to check like click through rate and view count and the of 10 of a video. What I'm trying to do more these days, travis, is go into the comments and see what our regular viewers are first commenting on. And so now I'm trying to be more grounded in, as you said, the transformation, the impacts we hopefully have in a positive and a motivational sense for our audience. And when I see a comment such as like I needed this video today, right now, or like this video is speaking to me, like yeah, that that is worth more than you know. A thousand views in an hour.

Speaker 2:

All right. Next one hi vidi crew. I've been taking advantage of vidiq's uh free thumbnail and title rating tool. My scores have been 82 for title and 87 for thumbnail. Can you help me interpret how good our average scores these are? I've only posted two videos on my channel and both have got practically identical scores. I'm curious to know how I'm doing it with rates and how other people are doing. Thank you for doing a great job.

Speaker 2:

So every once in a while I want to talk a little bit about the vidIQ software. You can get access to it for free, vidiqcom dot com. That is something that we do here and we love to help people out. And the score thing is very interesting because I think you have to understand what the tool is trying to do. The tool is trying to point you in a direction. It's not necessarily trying to say good, bad and different. It's pointing you in a direction. And we do spend our engineers spend a lot of time tweaking that thing to make it even better and better and kind of, look at what your thumbnail is doing, your title is doing, but ultimately the real arbiter of all that is the viewer.

Speaker 2:

So these tools are great for people who just have no idea, like I don't know what my title should be at all, and it will definitely point you in the right direction. Same thing with the thumbnail Like we're going to help you move in the proper direction. There is no like quote good, average number, um, because you remember in a vacuum, these things, these numbers, don't exist at all on youtube. It's something that vidIQ came up with to kind of help put you in the right direction. So I think when you're in the 80s and 90s, you're in the right direction. You just need to look at does that thumbnail now make sense in the niche that you're in? Um, what would you say? This is always difficult for us because we don't directly work with the software. We have to, like explain the software after the fact, like what are the things that you think of when you, when you come across stuff like this?

Speaker 1:

I mirror what you say, travis, in that, whether it's our tools, somebody else's tools or youtube itself, judging the success of a video by a, an individual or isolated score is just going to drive you crazy, in the same sense that you could look at your YouTube analytics and say, well, this video got 20% click through rate. Why is it not doing better than it should be? And then I go back to again what you said, travis If you're getting higher scores on our tools, then what it's pointing towards is hey, you're not doing something completely stupid here. You've used a custom thumbnail. First of all, thumbs up. It probably isn't cluttered with too many elements. That's probably a good thing as well. It's using colors that combine with each other nicely. You're probably doing something there as well. It's using colors that combine with each other nicely. You're probably doing something there as well.

Speaker 1:

But it it can't read mind. Read your viewers and your target audience and exactly what they're looking for and what they need. Uh, hopefully, as our tools become more sophisticated and we have more data, we'll be able to continue to improve on them. But yeah, as you say, travis, these are tools. These are not on and off buttons like right and wrong. This definitely means something's going to work. But we appreciate you using our tools and like hey, if you have feedback, if you think this score seems arbitrary and it's not really helping me, we want to hear that feedback so we can improve it even further.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely, tell us, let us know. We're always improving. And, uh, the the devs are like we get to look at slack all the time and they're constantly adjusting everything.

Speaker 1:

It's really, really awesome to see it's funny actually that we we created a slack channel, like about six months ago, and the developers said hey, um, creators, if you have any ideas, send, send them away. And I replied and said you do realise you're opening up the floodgates here. And then, within like 24 hours, whoosh, they got a ton of suggestions and that's why you've seen, particularly in the Chrome extension, some big updates and improvements to existing tools. The scorecard, the real time stats thing, which is still my personal favourite of vid iq, that's had a big upgrade. The thumbnail preview tool, which we kind of neglected for a few years. You click on it now it's like holy smokes. I can customize this completely and see what my phone is going to look like in all different shapes and sizes. So, yeah, if you haven't tried our chrome extension for a while, browser extension, give that a try, because it's looking pretty damn fine these days.

Speaker 2:

There's a link in the description and in the show notes. If you've never done that, it's right there. Go ahead and click it, install it. It's really great. One of our last emails is from Angie, new listener. I love the podcast but I'm sad to say I've binged all of them and now have to wait for weekly uploads. That seems, but I'm sad to say I've binged all of them and now I have to wait for weekly uploads. That seems impossible. I don't know. That seems all the way back to um the jeremy vesters. Do we still have them? Like? Yeah, they should all be in the audio podcast, I think. I think angie's talking about the youtube channel. I can't imagine she's talking about the audio. Okay, fair, no way you've listened to all the audio podcasts. But youtube, okay, maybe as far as cadbury cream, eggs, candy Corn, you're both missing the mark. Sour Patch, watermelon, all the way. Have you ever had that?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I can feel that. Yeah, Sour Patch Treats.

Speaker 2:

Sour Patch. Is that something you can get in the UK? Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1:

The Sour Patch variant of candy? Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 2:

So Sour Patch is worldwide. Okay, did you have sour patch cards? The, the did you have those no, they're not familiar.

Speaker 2:

Okay, uh, I have to shout out. I have a shout out and a question. First, I'm gonna give a huge shout out to my former vid iq coach, antonio. Antonio was amazing, by the way, antonio, incredible guy who I worked with for the first part of 2025. He convinced me to separate my channel to two and niche down on both. Because of this painful but need to change, I was recently approached by two different companies. Each asked me to produce some custom videos for them. I'm an educator that's amazing one for each of my niches, totally out of the blue. Thank you, antonio. This would have never happened without his advice and encouragement. We need to get that message over to antonio, I just screenshotted it.

Speaker 1:

I'm sending it into the select one right now, that's amazing.

Speaker 2:

Now for my question how do I negotiate, make sure I'm getting paid what I deserved? What are the important things to keep in mind when I'm entering into contracts like this? Chatgbt has been incredibly helpful, reviewing contracts and giving me talking points. This is all new to me. I'm a small but growing creator with 6,400 subs on one channel and 1,000 of my newest Would love any advice. Angie, if you've watched all the episodes, I have to imagine you watched the one with Justin Moore, which is going to be your North star for this conversation. I will also talk about my experience and, rob, you can give me your advice too. But for sure, when it comes to this, this type of thing, 100% watch the, the, the Justin Moore episode. It will. It will be a great place. He's also got a book and some other things. He's an incredible guy that wants people to make more money. He wants the creators to make more money and tells you how to kind of do that.

Speaker 2:

Having said that, first of all, congratulations, and it really just proves something that I want to. I want to actually um, I want to do in a future episode about smaller creators doing big things, and this is a channel. This is a person with a channel under 10 000 subscribers is being approached by companies to do things like sponsorship stuff. That's incredible. That also just goes to show the power of what we do. We are creators, but we're also directors, writers, actors, editors all these things that these companies have to pay individual people for, but we're in one package, so we actually have a lot to offer. I would also say that once you figure out where it is, you want to be, uh, on like the money side of things, which could be an affiliate deal. It could be something simple like that like you know, I'll get you this many sales and you give me this back, or whatever it is. Um, the.

Speaker 2:

The rule of thumb is this and I've told this story before. You probably heard it if you tell them a number and they say yes right away, you just undershot yourself. I've done this many times. I gave one time I shot up a number and I'm like there's no way they're going to pay it and they immediately said yes and I'm like don't, because that means I probably could have got double. So that's number one. Like if you put out a number and they immediately accepted it, you, you shot too low.

Speaker 2:

Secondarily, I think you kind of look at like what's realistic if you want them to be an ongoing thing or if you just want it to be one off. If it's ongoing, I always try to snag them and I think Justin talked about this for more than one engagement. So more than one video. Because there's two reasons for this. Number one you should be able to get more money out of it If you like. Instead of doing one for like 500, I'm not saying that's how much you charge, let's say one for 500, you could do three for like a thousand, and while that's not 500 each, they were probably never going to give you a thousand, but if you give them a value, then they might actually give you a thousand dollars. You just do three videos rather than one for 500. So look to make a deal for them so that they want to come back to you. And also gives you a chance to succeed, because ultimately they will come back to you if they see value in what they paid for.

Speaker 2:

If you do a one-off and it doesn't go well, you may never hear from them again. You want to hear from them if they're a good company and you enjoy dealing with them. You want to give them a deal so that they want to come back and you have a constant flow of money. I've done this with multiple sponsors that I've worked with for years. Could I have gotten a lot more money up front? The first time, probably, but I may never have worked with them again, but over the aggregate over the years, I've definitely made more money by not being too greedy up front. Uh, justin might tell you a different way to do it, but that was been. That's been my experience. Rob, what do you think about when you see questions like this?

Speaker 1:

so this might be complete frontier gibberish, because I have never really had to go through this sponsorship brand deal process in my life as a content creator. I know that might be hard to believe, but essentially the story is I made a video about a vidIQ tool. Rob Sandy, the CEO, contacted me and he said do you want to work for vidIQ? And I thought, well, I'm never going to have to worry about any brand deals or sponsorships ever again. So the answer is yes.

Speaker 1:

The funny thing is talking about how you undervalued yourself, travis. I think this is where the loyalty and the trust came in. I don't know if I've told you this story before, but when we were first negotiating an hourly rate here at vidIQ, rob said how much are you going to charge? And I had no idea. I've never charged an hourly rate. I don't know what I'm doing here on youtube. I never thought I'd be able to do anything freelance creative. So let's say 25 an hour. And he said no, I'm going to pay you 45 an hour. Wow, so I'd undervalue myself. And he said no, I think you're worth more than that, and that's. From that moment on, I've had that trust and that relationship with Rob at the IQ. So, like you know, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Speaker 1:

Now, going back to the topic in hand, as I say, this may be completely rubbish, but my thought would be that, just to get some experience of negotiating a deal, might you offer a bit of a like not a bargain, but like a good deal for them, but like only a singular video so that you gain some experience but you don't permanently undervalue yourself? Is that something to consider? I don't know. Another thing to think about is like we have no idea how to price this, because, irrespective of how many views you get, there's a big difference between promoting an energy drink and luxury cruisers. Like selling luxury cruisers, you should be charging a huge amount from those a thousand views, because you only need like 20 people to buy the luxury cruise for it to be very valuable to them. And then there's the other thing, like do you just charge by the video or do you charge through an affiliate deal, like a recurring income in perpetuity? There's all these little particular things to consider. So those are just my thoughts.

Speaker 2:

I don't know if they're useful or not I think, between what we've said and what justin says, she should have a good idea of where to go. I would love to hear a follow-up on this, so yeah after this is all said and done with, and you've done the, the promos and you kind of have a story to tell, we'd love to hear you send another email to us.

Speaker 1:

We would love to hear from you it's just awesome to hear that somebody's now turning their skills into a business rather than just a passive, passive income from ad revenue. I mean that's all well and cool, but now you're being approached yeah giving you offers. Yeah, I was gonna say also my um. My other thought was ask antonio, sure he can, surely he can give you the best that he wasn't here anymore.

Speaker 2:

Right, like so, he, he doesn't. He's not a good iq anymore, but he's no, no, no, he's not around anymore. Uh, he's doing, he's off to big, big things, man he's. I see him in ads all the time, like I'm on facebook, and he's on ads every other, every other day. It's weird, it's crazy. He's a great guy, though I, I really, really enjoy Antonio Last one.

Speaker 2:

So a couple of months back, I had encouraged I forgot about this until this email came in I encouraged people to send us video questions and we did an episode with that and it was cool, and I forgot about it and someone sent in a video question. Now, this video question is like three minutes long. We, we're gonna watch the whole thing because why not? Right, it's only three minutes. We'll give him the watch time, right, we'll give him the watch time. It's, uh, it's cool because he goes over a couple of things that I think we can talk about after the fact. Um, but this one is from chris. Let me go ahead and share this and let's give him a watch and see what he has to say.

Speaker 3:

Hello tren or trob or tran or theresisa, whoever you've got co-hosting. I just wanted to. I just wanted to, um, basically say I've jumped on youtube coaching. It's taken me three years to make the plunge and I just wanted to sort of talk about what your viewers probably experienced over the years. That you start off like I did. It was like Minecraft content and you know the title was Minecraft, my World, part 1. Description me playing Minecraft. That was it. Post. See what happens. Expect world domination.

Speaker 3:

It doesn't go like that, and over time I realized that the every little thing you put on the youtube upload sheet is crucial. The other day I had a shot about a tt rpg role-playing game that isn't out yet, so it had no name recognition, and it sat for 15 hours with 12 impressions. And then I put D&D in brackets Dungeons, dragons, because that's kind of roughly what it is and suddenly I had 1,000 impressions. It kicked it off. It's like every little bit of data that you choose to put on your video matters. Like you say, the click. You try to get someone to put their finger on the phone to click and it's all psychology and it's, in one way, terribly, terribly hard.

Speaker 3:

There are loads of people you can hear about on other podcasts with. You know, 50 titles for one video, 50 thumbnails for one video, and it really can make the difference. It does make the difference and yet there's a midpoint, isn't there? And I think that's where I am Trying with multiple thumbnails, three thumbnails, trying with maybe one or two titles and having enough success where I'm happy. I know a dozen of the names who comment regular. I'm making some money every month and, yeah, it's like subscribers don't matter. It doesn't matter that I've got nearly 3,000 subscribers if I'm only getting 200 views. You should be counting by either views or by likes. You know, and I just it's not really.

Speaker 3:

This isn't really a question. This is just all those things that we listen to your podcasts, we listen to other podcasts and it just doesn't get acted upon. It's crucial and you have to keep testing and finding and you have to enjoy it. You know subscribers used to matter. Now they don't Just like. How would you make a question out of this for your podcast? What would the headline be of your podcast if you had to title this as a video? It's me rambling about YouTube and then if this was my video and I had to go to YouTube. I'd have to then come up with some cunning title and cunning thumbnail trying to get people to click. It's a game, isn't it? You've got to gamify it. Anyway, I see what you do with that. So, yeah, all the advice in the world only goes so far. It's what you listen to and act on and learn. So yeah, hey, good luck with it all. Thank you and I'll see you later.

Speaker 1:

All right, so I think the title should be Rob Wilson, from vidIQ's doppelganger, rambles on about metadata and, if it's important, on YouTube.

Speaker 2:

How many people are going to click that. Thank you for that, chris. He said a lot of things which I think were really critical. First of all, subs don't matter. I love how he said that it is correct about that. Can't disagree with that. We actually didn't. We did. We do a video about that. I know we've talked about it a lot you. You say that a lot, and I think it's so important for people to understand that, especially when you're new, because I remember when I before I started watching, before I started doing youtube, I remember watching a channel at 10 000 subscribers. Remember at the time thinking, wow, that's a lot of subscribers. When I saw they had videos that had like 200 views, I was floored. I'm like, wait a minute, I thought you don't have like 10 000 views every video. Like I had no idea. Yeah, no, that's not a thing, uh, that that one does not equal the other. So it is very um. I love hearing that a creator that's uh listening to the podcast gets that because it's so critical.

Speaker 1:

And then also what you said earlier about having fun you said the same thing, yeah um, it still grinds my gears when some people say midway through the video uh, I've just noticed that only um 20 of my viewers are subscribers, so it'd be really important if you can subscribe, it really does help the channel. Every time I hear somebody say that, I shout no, it doesn't. It's like you know, it's probably that's probably not 100 accurate, but yeah, yeah, just get them to watch another video, don't get them to subscribe, I think I think they do that to make people feel like they need to subscribe.

Speaker 2:

It's like reminds them, like oh, I guess it helps you, okay, let me subscribe. I think it's more for that's guilting them into doing it.

Speaker 1:

I think this does sound like a person who's kind of getting paralyzed with choice in the thought of having to come up with like many different titles for videos. And yeah, maybe a slight adjustment to the title for that short did bring in a thousand impressions, but again, we're still talking about relatively small data sample size there. I think for Chris, what I would perhaps suggest is that the need to roll back to even earlier in a process, and that might be coming up with better or testing new video ideas, because if you're constantly tweaking the thumbnails and the titles, trying to eke out some more you know what you might call marginal gains it feels like the idea in the first place just didn't really match up to the audience's expectations. That might get you out of the funk, chris, of constantly playing around with titles and thumbnails. Now we've been Jen, dan and myself have been wrestling with this question about how useful is the A-B title testing, because we're doing all of these changes and tests and we get these results whereby one title is 4% better than the other one, but it doesn't necessarily inform us to make sweeping changes on the channel.

Speaker 1:

I'm not feeling, after two years of thumbnail testing and title testing, that I definitively know what thumbnails work better than others. I tend to find that if the idea is really good, then yeah, like a slight change of a thumbnail on the title might get you a bit more traction. But it ultimately starts at the very beginning and if the idea is not good enough, then that's just going to be an anchor or a handicap for the video, regardless of if you're trying to make a really good title, thumbnail or hook. I rambled a bit there. As long as, chris, I do apologize.

Speaker 2:

No, it was good and I think that, um, I think what you said. First of all, it was very critical, and also the fun part I just want to harp back on that he said to having fun and it's doing it. Otherwise, all of this is for not, um, but yeah, I think I think, uh, it's. First of all, thank you for sending us the the video, chris. It's always good to see people and, um, yeah, we now we're curious about those, uh, those books in the background. Uh, I think that will do for today. Uh, definitely enjoyed having you, rob, actually. So when I get off of here, I'm gonna go into the kitchen because I got something. So I, daryl eves, was on the last episode and if you haven't watched that episode, please go watch. It's amazing. He leaves so many great nuggets of information. But the reason I bring that up is because yes, sorry for the downgrade everyone the um.

Speaker 2:

the one of the first things we talked about is because he lives in utah and I just just recently visited friends in Utah and while I was there my friend made homemade fruit roll-ups and I never had a homemade fruit roll-up before. Have you had fruit roll-ups before? I don't even know what one is. You don't even know what a fruit roll-up is. They call it leather now Maybe you've heard that phrase. Very tasty little treat. I'm sure they have them in the uk, but they're I don't want to say they're a kid's treat, because I think that makes it sound weird, but, um, they're definitely very tasty anyway. Oh, like really savory and sweet.

Speaker 1:

Yes, yeah, yeah, one of the two.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, okay, yeah, it just kind of looks like halloween candy I might have kind of, but I feel like, um, when you make them naturally out of like fruits and stuff, it's it more kind of natural. Anyway, I was talking to him just the other day because I saw him the other day. He was visiting Seattle and we were talking about that. I'm like man, they were so good, he goes well.

Speaker 2:

You just need a food dehydrator. So I ordered one $45 or whatever from Amazon. I wanted to make my own, so it's super simple to do. I took some applesauce, I took some applesauce, I put it on parchment paper and I put it into the food dehydrator overnight, and right before I came on the podcast, I tried it.

Speaker 1:

So good.

Speaker 2:

So good. So I'm going to go make some more with apple butter this time, and then also you can make beef jerky with it. So I'm going to be the food dehydrator channel, I think, coming up here in the next couple of days because I'm finding the interesting things about dehydrating your food, which was never on my radar of interesting things before. Uh, this this last weekend so is this.

Speaker 1:

Is this in any way, shape or form, a healthy way of making treats or food?

Speaker 2:

it can be. So the reason why it can be is because you are now in control of what's in there, buying something from the store that you know has all types of shenanigans in it. Like, for example, I've been losing weight over the last six, seven months and I don't want to have too much sugar. So what I would do is, instead of the applesauce, which does have cinnamon sugar in it, in the future, when I make other stuff I can put in sugar substitute, so there's not any calories or anything. So, yeah, absolutely, absolutely can be. So that's your, your Nate, your treat tip for the week, but that'll do it for us today. Thank you so much, rob, for joining me. I greatly appreciate it. If you want to leave us a message, you can do that. If you want to install the the software, there's a link in the description below. And, of course, you want to subscribe to us on YouTube. We would not hate you for that. We would love to see you Well.

Speaker 2:

I would Well you might well, because, for whatever reason, Just don't subscribe. Watch another podcast, oh yeah, you know what Good point? Don't subscribe, just go watch the Dare Leaves.

Speaker 1:

And then, if you watch that, watch the Justin Moore one the one that we mentioned earlier.

Speaker 2:

Just watch, just watch. All don't even subscribe, just watch a bunch and watch how often we show up on your home page, in fact we want you to comment on all of the extra podcasts you watch and just type in cat all caps.

Speaker 1:

I did not subscribe, oh wow there we go.

Speaker 2:

Wow, I will approve all of those comments. I'm sure they'll get caught in the filter because they're all caps. You know what I just realized too. This is a thing there's a video coming out that Rob and I shot together where at the end I go hashtag this, hashtag that, and I realized they're all going to get caught in the filter, so I might have to when that video goes live. I have to go through, and anyway, I just made myself do more work. Anyway, we'll see y'all in the next one.